and habits of life. 3. The actuality of
a divine government in the church. 4. The
services of God, being and including the
enjoyment of life. 5. The nobility of work.

This last principle, that manual labour is
good and noble in itself, has never been taken
as a fundamental truth by any church. All
through Christendom the gentleman is not the
man who labours, but the man who enjoys the
fruits of others' labours; and, in the Hindu
ordering of society, the high-caste Brahmin
deems work a curse, and the hewer of wood
and drawer of water as far below the rank of
gentleman as a dog is below a man. But with
the saints work is righteousness; and to be a
toiling and producing man is to be in a state of
grace. Side by side with the nobility of work
lies the righteousness of marriage with the
Mormons; not only as expedient, not only as
respectable, but as absolute holiness— celibacy
being absolute sin. It is the will of God
that men and women have to work out— "that
is to say, all human beings have a function to
discharge on earth— the function of providing
tabernacles of the flesh for immortal spirits now
waiting to be born." Mormonism is the most
practical protest that has ever been made
against those celibate bodies and institutions
which hitherto have been regarded as especially
sacred and pure. Captain Hooper, the
representative of Utah in congress, has never
been able to rise high in the church, because he
is a steadfast monogamist. "We look on Hooper
as only half a Mormon," said the apostle
Taylor (" at which every one laughed in a
sly peculiar way"), Taylor having three wives,
while some have five, and others seven. As for
Brigham Young, the women who are sealed to
him as his nominal but not actual wives are
almost countless; his actual wives are about
twelve in number. The queen of all is the first
wife, Mary Ann Angell, an aged lady, whose five
children are now grown up; and perhaps the
most distinguished is Eliza Snow, the poetess,
and generally reputed Young's wife only in
name. "About fifty years old, with silver hair,
dark eyes, and noble aspect, simple in attire,
calm, lady-like, and rather cold, Eliza is the exact
reverse to any imaginary light of the harem." The
Mormon rite of sealing a woman to a man implies
other relations than our Gentile rite of marriage;
it is only by a wide perversion of terms
that the female saints who may be sealed to a
man are called his wives. But the oddest
form of sealing is that which unites the living
with the dead, either by a proxy on earth or by
direct, if shadowy, bondage with the grave.

The effect of this polygamous life on the bearing
of the women themselves is by no means
satisfactory. Saddened, secluded, taking but
small part in the conversation even when
they do appear, respectful to humility to the
father or husband, deft and clever servants
— but only servants— giving no sign by look or
word that they feel themselves mistresses in
their own houses, the wives of the Mormon are
by no means living advertisements of the
blessings of polygamy. Many young girls will
not marry. They prefer to remain single, and
to work hard, rather than to live in comparative
ease and leisure as the fourth or fifth wife of a
Mormon bishop. Belinda Pratt holds to the
man's doctrine that the women like it; and that
the more loving the wife, the more eager she is
to see her lord mated with a new spouse, even
seeking out and courting for him such as she
might consider likely to please. But no other
Mormon woman would own to this, and every
one to whom the question was put flushed out
into denial, "though with that caged and broken
courage which seems to characterise every
Mormon wife." "Court a new wife for him!" said
one lady; "no woman would do that, and no
woman would submit to be courted by a woman!"
"I believe it's right," said a rosy English girl
who had been three years in Utah, " and I think
it is good for those who like it; but it is not good
for me, and I will not have it." Do the wives
dislike it? she was asked. "Some don't, most
do. They take it for their religion. I can't say
any woman likes it. Some women live very
comfortably together— not many; most have
their tiffs and quarrels, though their husbands
may never know of them. No woman likes to
see a new wife come into the house."

The manner of living is still an open question
in Utah, as to whether it is best to provide a
separate home for each wife or to assemble them
under one roof. Young sets the example of
unity. A few old ladies who have been sealed
to him for heaven live in cottages apart, but all
his actual wives—  the mothers of his children—
dwell in one block close together, dine at one
table, and join in the family prayers. On the
other hand, Taylor the apostle keeps his
families in separate orchards and cottages; each
saint being left free to arrange his household as
he thinks best, provided he keeps public peace.

"Women," said Young, " will be more easily
saved than men. They have not sense enough to
go wrong. Men have more knowledge and more
power, therefore they can go more quickly and
more certainly to hell." " The Mormon creed,"
adds Mr. Dixon, "appears to be that woman is
not worth damnation. In the Mormon heaven
men, on account of their sins, may stop short in
the stage of angels; but women, whatever their
offences, are all to become the wives of gods."

This, then, is the religion which the republican
platform has pledged itself to crush. We
mean to put that business of the Mormons
through," said a New England politician; "we
have done a bigger job than that in the South,
and we shall now fix up things in the Salt Lake
city." The United States has a law against
polygamy, and on that ground the anti-Mormons
will take their stand, and enforce monogamy
and morality at the point of the bayonet.
Whether or not they will succeed, if they try,
remains to be proved. Persecution has never
yet destroyed a church; and when once polygamy
becomes the seal of martyrdom, even such
men as Captain Hooper and such women as the
rosy-faced English girl will rush into it,